Some EMDS, Some GEs and Some Alcos

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I really enjoyed H. Roger Grant’s piece on William White in Summer 2002 CLASSIC TRAINS but one thing puzzled me. Mr. Grant wrote that White, soon after taking over as president of Erie Lackawanna, ordered 36 2500 h.p. diesels -evenly split between EMD (GP35s), GE (U25Bs) and Alco (C425s). Since 36 units was a small order even in the 1960s why would White have split the order between three builders? From an operational standpoint (crew familiarity, maintenance, parts) wouldn’t it have made more sense to stick with one builder, if not one model?

(BTW, Pat McGinnis did the same thing when he was president of the New Haven Railroad in the mid-50s and NH fans are still flaming him for it today!)

2

Messrs. White and McGinnis no doubt wanted to keep in good graces with all three loco builders if at all possible.

3

Back then, 36 units would have been a large order, especially from a smaller railroad. If any railroad ordered more than 50 units at a time, it was NEWS!

And there’s nothing unusual about checking out all three builders at once (if you had “duds”, you could lose them fairly quickly, and a the unit that served the railroad the best would be re-ordered). ACL did this when they first started buying six-axle units. And C&O, which already owned SD40s, bought four C630s and four U30Cs to check them out (they ordered more U30Cs; the 630s were gone realtively quickly).